The waxing crescent moon is setting as I type. It was crisp in the sky hanging over the cold Virginia hills. Glimpsing the moon tonight was like participating in its immensity, silence, and its stillness.
Telescope by Louise Glück
There is a moment after you move your eye away when you forget where you are because you've been living, it seems, somewhere else, in the silence of the night sky. You've stopped being here in the world. You're in a different place, a place where human life has no meaning. You're not a creature in a body. You exist as the stars exist, participating in their stillness, their immensity. Then you're in the world again. At night, on a cold hill, taking the telescope apart. You realize afterward not that the image is false but the relation is false. You see again how far away each thing is from every other thing.
-Louise Glück, “Telescope” in POEMS 1962-2012 © 2024 Louise Glück.